Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The first sentence of Fred Lewis Pattee's history of
the American short story states authoritatively, "The American short story
began in 1819 with Washington Irving."
Claiming that with his craftsmanship, originality, and style, Irving
made short fiction popular by stripping away the form's moral and didactic
element and by adding richness of atmosphere, unity of tone, humor, definite
locality, and individual characters; Pattee concludes that in Irving the
"Addisonian Arctic current was cut across by the Gulf Stream of
romanticism," to give birth to the American short story, "a new
genre, something distinctively and unquestionably our own in the world of
letters."

Actually, a number of genres and narrative
conventions come together in the work of Irving: travel sketch, folktale, gothic romance,
historical romance, and neoclassical essay. The first problem to consider is
the effect of linking a descriptive genre--the sketch--with a narrative
genre--the folktale--in Irving's two most famous short fictions. It is well-known that the plots for "Rip
Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" came from German
legend. However, in a letter dated September 4, 1824, Irving made it clear that
these plots were merely vulgar vehicles for what he considered a respectable
rhetorical purpose: "I wish, in
everything I do, to write in such a manner that my productions may have
something more than the mere interest of narrative to recommend them, which is
very evanescent; something, if I dare use the phrase, of classical merit,
&c., which gives a production some chance of duration beyond the mere whim
and fashion of the day."

One of the most important results of Irving's
devaluation of the tale and elevation of style and tone is that tale
conventions are foregrounded and parodied by the sophisticated teller who mocks
the supernatural basis of the tale.
Furthermore, because sketch conventions focus more attention on specific
detail than the primarily narrative tale form, the formerly projective and
plot-based gothic tale is altered by the presence of a skeptical narrator who
is more concerned with expressing his own impressionistic perspective than with
telling a story. Moreover, because the teller is highly self-conscious of his
use of realistic techniques of the sketch to present psychological projections
of the tale, the resulting story tends to foreground, and thus thematize,
storytelling elements; this is a very common effect when a work
self-consciously adopts the conventions of previous genres as a means of parodying
them. Finally, the self-conscious skeptical narrator tends to probe beneath the
supernatural base of the story to expose its origins in dream and wish
fulfillment.

"Rip Van Winkle" is the most obvious
example of this exposure of the wish-fulfillment base of the traditional
story. If the folklore source of
"Rip Van Winkle" is undisclosed, its self-conscious literary source
is foregrounded in the prologue, which attributes the tale to Diedrich
Knickerbocker, an historian who, although he does his research among the folk,
treats the folk as though they were the "clasped volume of a
black-letter" book which he studies with the "zeal of a
book-worm." The tone here is not
that of the folklore teller, but of the ruminative sophisticate who considers
the meaning of what he tells, in this case meditating on how shrewish wives may
make the tempers of their husbands pliant, concluding, with an ironic
Addison/Steele style aside: "A
termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects be considered a tolerable
blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed."

That Rip's disappearance into the mountains is the
result of his desire to escape his wife, not just for a day, but forever, is
suggested by the fact that his departure is simultaneous with the depth of his
despair when he is psychically ready for deliverance; and indeed, just as he
looks down into a deep mountain glen, "wild, lonely, and shagged," an
embodiment of his despondency, he sighs and hears his name, the identify he
finds intolerable, called out. The most
significant leap of time in American fiction--the twenty years that Rip
sleeps--is made in the space between the end of one paragraph and the next,
which begins, "On waking." And
on waking, Rip is, of course, not where he was when watching the men playing,
but rather back at the edge of the wild glen where he felt such despair and
heard the name called of an identity he will now have reason to doubt.

As is typical of other nineteenth-century
short-story characters who undergo experiences they cannot naturalize precisely
because their experiences exist within the realm of a different genre from the
one they seem to inhabit, Rip feels "perplexity" and wonders whether
he is bewitched or if the world is. Time
has passed as time must, but Rip, much like Cervantes' jealous Hidalgo, sleeps
in the realm of one story while events go on around him in the realm of
another. And since one's identity is
determined by the story he inhabits, Rip believes he is not himself but someone
else. When he sees his son, who has
lived in the time-bound world of reality while he has lived in the timeless
world of dream and folktale, Rip says "That's me yonder." Like Hawthorne's Wakefield, he has stepped
aside into a story of his own desire for escape and thus has been displaced in
the world of phenomenological reality.

It is poetic justice and narrative inevitability
that just as Rip has objectified his deepest desire in oneiric story, on
awaking his new identity would become that of storyteller. And like Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner, Rip does tell his story, over and over again, to anyone who
will listen, sometimes varying its details, which the skeptical narrator, in
typical Hawthorne fashion, says is "doubtless owing to his having so
recently wakened." The narrator concludes with an essayistic meditation on
the wish-fulfillment source of the story:
"It is a common wish of all henpecked husbands..... that they might
have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle's flagon."

Even more than in "Rip Van Winkle,"
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" sustains a world of dream where story
contagion is in the air. Just as the
deep glen is an objectification of Rip's deepest desire to escape despair,
Sleepy Hollow is a place that does not exist except in the imagination, a
timeless region located in space, a placeless place where one could steal away
and dream his life away. It is dreamy,
bewitched, spellbound; people are given to marvelous beliefs, are subject to
visions, see strange sights; it is tale-haunted world, an enchanted region, a
region of shadows. By placing such a
timeless story in the realm of the time bound Irving creates a hybrid tale
quite different than what has gone before.
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a story about fiction's ability
to alter the nature of reality, self-consciously particularizes a timeless
legend by localizing it in space and grounding it in social reality.

The most obvious sign of the story's hybrid nature
is the pervasive overdetermination in the story; everything is extreme,
overdone, multiplied. Katrina is plump
as a partridge; Brom is Herculean; Ichabod is American literature's
quintessential grotesque. One of the
most puzzling of these overdeterminations is the fact that Katrina's sending
Ichabod away after the party makes Brom Bones' headless horseman trick
unnecessary. However, whereas practical
explanations may suffice in a realistic tale, they will not do in a folk
legend, for the short story convention insists that Ichabod's story world must
be actualized. "No tale was too
gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow." Thus, the skeptical narrator leaves the
conclusion of the story--whether the headless horseman or Brom Bones chased
Ichabod out of the valley--open, leaving the mix of two types of
stories--folktale of headless goblins or realistic story of one man getting rid
of a rival--in suspension.

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."